So, you've decided to join the true PC Gaming Master Race and get 3Dvision. Nice one! Once you've experienced the exquisite immersion that comes from gaming in proper 3D, you'll find it hard to ever go back. But 3Dvision comes with a performance cost, and you're wondering how your PC will handle it. How much 3Dvision affects your FPS varies game by game, but there are some rules of thumb.

Putting the Rules of Thumb to the test

In 3Dvision, the GPU needs to pump out twice the frames as in 2D (one for each eye). Based on this, 3Dvision users sometimes make two claims:

Claim #1: Turning on 3Dvision in a game will generally halve the FPS

Claim #2: 3Dvision and SLI are a match made in heaven, since the former requires two [similar] frames per eye, and the latter gives you two [similar] GPUs with which to render them.

Intuitively, these claims sound fair enough, but I decided to do some testing and find out for sure.